Gears of War 3 co-op makes beasts of gamers

Back in 2008, Gears of War 2 introduced Horde mode, a co-operative way to play that saw five friends holing up and fending off wave after wave of hideous creatures. When it launches next year, Gears of War 3 will add a new Beast multiplayer mode that lets you and your friends get inside those marauding monsters.

I played a few rounds of the promising five-player Beast co-op during a hands-on E3 event here on Thursday. We spawned on a map called Mercy, a church where Marcus and his COG buddies attempt to make a final stand. Our mission was to spawn as a variety of deadly creatures and attempt to off the computer-controlled humans.

The meatbags aren’t exactly helpless -- they’re armed with the standard COG loadout, and they’ve also got mounted turrets, barbed wire and laser fences to keep the beasts from running roughshod over them.

I started by spawning as the smallest monster -- a Ticker. I steered the small, fast-moving suicide bug around the human barricades and self-destructed at the feet of two human gunners. That was two down and many more smoldering splatters of flesh and blood to go.

Beast mode is still being tweaked, Gears of War 3’s Rod Ferguson told me. When the game ships, players will have to earn the ability to spawn as bigger, meaner monsters by getting kills and causing damage.

For the demo, we had free reign to spawn as almost anything we wanted. In this early stage, the creatures were split into four categories. Beasts are nasty little creatures like the Ticker and a new, slithering insectoid called a Serapede. (As this critter, I squirmed around the feet of humans, clamping their legs between my electrically charged tentacles. I racked up more kills as this monster than as any other.)

Other categories will be familiar to anybody who has played Gears of War. Within the Humanoid and Drone categories, players can opt to spawn as a gun-wielding locust or play as a Kantus healer.

Big beasts like the Boomers prove a real hoot to play. One of the behemoths totes a new gun called The Digger that launches burrowing missiles underground and beneath cover. A Mauler, with its giant flail, can smash human barbed-wire fences with a single swing.

Destroying humans isn’t as easy as it sounds, though. More than a few times, the A.I. defenders ran out the clock, surviving our attack and forcing us to replay the wave and slaughter more efficiently.

Even in this early state, it’s easy to tell that Beast mode will be as appealing to co-op gamers as Horde -- which, I might add, is being refined and tweaked for Gears of War 3 as well.